Written by: Samar F. Zia
Posted on: December 17, 2018 | 
| 中文
Berries and Men So Merry by Maria Khan
The curatorial premise of The Perfect Gentleman rests on a desire to examine what it means to be masculine in today’s time and age. With movements such as Me Too on the rise, it questions how the traditional meaning of masculinity has been impacted. In this vain, curator Zahra Khan has selected young Pakistani artists Sophia Balagamwala, Saud Baloch, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Maria Ali Khan, and Abdullah Qureshi.
Where some of the visuals are more relevant to Khan’s idea than others, there is one thing that is made increasingly evident. A more versatile representation of men in contemporary art is on the rise. Art history has seen an abundance of women represented by male artists, a fact which has often been synonymous with the objectification of women in the arts. Needless to say, there hasn’t been a lack of male representation in the history of art-making but it has mostly been glorifying as opposed to objectifying. In present times, this representation has evolved to become egalitarian and inclusive.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s practice overtly champions queer politics visualised via kitsch textile pieces. The works included in the exhibit are bold in their outlook and borrow from ethnic Pakistani textile ornamentation. Bhutto’s two pieces in the show Guerrilla Jang Key Hathiar and Setting Sun are part of a larger body of work that imagines a fantastical future where Queer Muslim’s challenge Western Imperialism and rigid gender and religious categorisation.
Abdullah Qureshi makes large-scale gestural paintings of silhouettes that are vastly monochrome in colour. He is interested in urban queer cultures. His visuals are a result of personal and intimate conversations about relationships with friends and family. This firsthand knowledge is meant to shed light on the sentimental and emotional side of men that is lost in masculinity and are the source of his subjective paintings.
Unlike Bhutto’s and Qureshi’s work, Sophia Balagamwala’s paintings represent men in a more traditional fashion, with massive moustaches and medallions. However, the intention is anything but an ode to patriarchal gender roles. Instead, owing to its execution that borrows from children's storybooks, the elaborately comical style of image-making ridicules traditional notions of masculinity.
Surrounded by works that are larger than life, I almost missed Saud Baloch’s work comprising of five gilded bowls, albeit the cosy nature of the gallery. These understated pieces require intimate inspection and it did not help that they were displayed below eye level. At first glance, they appear as textured gold bowls, but on closer inspection they each have a black and white image of men in a variety of postures embedded in the base on the inside. The images vary from those of prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, to historic figures from art history as well as those that Baloch has taken himself. As is suggested by the titles Infliction I-V, Baloch’s work is concerned with atrocities committed against young men. This may allude to the sensitivity and pain that men are not allowed to express because it goes against the norm of masculinity.
Placed diagonal to Baloch’s work are Maria Khan’s large-scale contrasting drawings. Her work is the kind that pulls the viewer in, owing to her subject, i.e. portraits of women. Minimal in technique with particular attention to detail around the eyes, the work is powerful with an element of sensuality as the mostly-unclothed female subject of her drawings stare unabashedly back at the viewer. Even though different in style and medium, the means of the work invokes a feeling of artists like Manet of the impressionist period, where the brazen subject looked out of the canvas, at the viewer. In the two pieces Miss Fortune and Berries and Men so Merry displayed in the exhibition, the linear contour marks on the body and face add age to the subject, but there isn’t a hint of masculinity in these aesthetic pieces; from the roses to the berries that are part of the drawings, each expresses the various facets and layers of women’s personalities.
The idea behind The Perfect Gentleman is an apt one - the work focuses on either queerness or machoism (or the lack thereof). It also brings to light a related matter that is lacking in representation in art thus far i.e. a representation of balance, where masculinity encompasses sensitivity towards and understanding of feminism and women, as opposed to just the polar ends of being a man i.e. macho or queer.
The exhibition is a collaboration between London’s Rossi and Rossi Gallery and Project Art Divvy. It continues until the 31st of January 2019.
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